


Modern Pleasures

by kerlin



Category: Alias
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-03
Updated: 2010-09-03
Packaged: 2017-10-11 10:42:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/111547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lauren hasn't always run red lights.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Modern Pleasures

**Author's Note:**

> "Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure." - Aldous Huxley

Lauren remembers with perfect clarity the first time she ran a red light.

She’d had her license for about a week, and the car for even less than that. Her father had had it delivered to the parking lot outside her dorm at the prep school the morning after she passed her driving test. The valet woke her up on a Sunday morning to give her the keys and a small card – _Congratulations, sweetheart, _in her father’s secretary’s handwriting.

It was a cherry-red Mustang convertible, the perfect car for the girl she wasn’t. Lauren had a 4.0 average and had been the most safety-conscious student in her driver’s ed class. She’d never been drunk, never made it past first base with a boy, and had only broken dorm curfew once, the night she assisted her mother at a banquet for the literacy charity in Washington.

It started with a purr, and the first day, she didn’t even take it out of the parking spot, just sat there in the driver’s seat and cried. After a few minutes, she went back up to her room, threw the keys into the bottom of the closet, ripped up the card, and started her calculus homework.

The car sat unused in the parking lot for five days; on Friday, Lauren received a summons from her mother to come home for the weekend. She packed a bag, careful to include the notes for her chemistry test on Monday, and was frustrated to discover that her small weekend traveler’s duffel barely fit in the trunk.

She could feel the engine purr through the gas pedal, and the car leapt into her hands like an eager dog when she accelerated.

When she came to the red light, it was the classic conscience situation: nothing but woods and pasture for miles, with a timed light that wouldn’t change for at least two more minutes.

Lauren tapped her nails against the steering wheel, looked left and right and then beside her, at the stiff new leather of the passenger seat, and up, at the canvas of the convertible top.

And she ran the red light.

If a police officer had pulled her over, she would have been completely at a loss to explain to him what had just happened. All she knew was that one moment she was waiting patiently and the next she had shifted her way up to third and knew for a fact that her car could go from zero to sixty in less than seconds.

The day Lauren ran her first red light was the same day she first broke the speed limit by more than twenty miles an hour.

Adrenaline poured through her veins, skittering up her spine and sucking all the moisture from her mouth. She held onto the steering wheel so tightly that all the blood left her hands and they became slick with cold sweat.

She released her grip just long enough to shift up to fourth, and she yelled out loud at the perfection of it all.

By the time Lauren pulled onto the road to the house (more like skidded into the turn) her hair was a long golden tangle and her cheeks were bright red from windburn.

(She’d lowered the convertible top going eighty: wind caught it and jerked her around like a toy, nearly flipping the car, but she hadn’t been afraid, not for one second, and had wrestled the car back into submission, sucking in long deep gulps of warm spring air and nearly choking on her laughter.)

She dropped the keys on the entry table and her bag in the hall and called for her mother, suddenly aware that her voice was raw, just a little bit husky. She decided she liked it.

“Lauren, sweetheart,” her mother said, hurrying in from the drawing room, took her hands and kissed her on the cheek. If she noticed that the skin was dry and cold from the wind, she didn’t say anything. “Thank you for coming. There’s someone here I’d like you to meet.”

It was just like any of a thousand returns home, and Lauren pulled her lips into a smile and tried to squelch the urge to grab her keys and just leave – not back to school, but somewhere else, anywhere else.

But her mother had her firmly by the elbow and was guiding her into the front drawing room, where a man was standing with his back to the door, looking out the window at the gardens and fields beyond.

He turned and smiled at her, and every one of Lauren’s senses pinged an alert. “Lauren Reed. Man, you grew up nice.” He was smiling a jackal’s hinge-jaw gaping grin. “I’m MacKenas Cole, old friend of your mom’s, and it is going to be _great_ to work with you.”

Lauren smiled back.  



End file.
